Chapter 1 - FIFTY-TWO CALLS
By the fifty-second call, Caroline Parker stopped believing Austin was worried about her.
She was sitting upright in a private recovery room at Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, eight stitches hidden beneath a bandage near her temple and her right leg trapped inside a white cast from thigh to ankle.
A delivery van had run a red light that morning.
Caroline’s SUV took the impact on the passenger side.
Her leg broke in two places.
She had spent hours being examined, imaged, stitched, medicated, and told repeatedly how fortunate she was.
Austin knew all of that.
Yet every voicemail sounded angrier than the one before it.
His father, Robert Parker, had died unexpectedly three days earlier.
Evelyn was hosting relatives and several longtime company friends at her Gold Coast condominium that night.
Apparently grief had not eliminated her expectation that dinner appear on time.
Austin’s forty-eighth voicemail said:
Mom has twenty people coming. You know what she likes. Call the caterer if you can’t cook.
Number fifty-one:
Stop making everything about your accident.
Number fifty-two:
You broke your leg, Caroline. You didn’t lose your hands.
When Austin finally burst into the hospital room, Caroline was already on the phone.
He had clearly come straight from his mother’s condominium. His dress shirt was half unbuttoned and wet after Evelyn had thrown a glass of water during an argument downstairs. By the time he reached Caroline’s room, he had ripped it off completely and carried it balled in one fist.
Evelyn followed him wearing a powder-blue pantsuit and pearls.
“Get dressed,” Austin said. “We’re leaving.”
Caroline stared.
“I can’t walk.”
“I’ll get a wheelchair.”
“I was admitted.”
“You’ve been cleared from surgery.”
“Not discharged.”
Evelyn threw up both hands.
“This is exactly what Robert warned me about. Everything becomes impossible around her.”
Caroline looked at her mother-in-law.
Robert had been dead seventy-two hours.
Already Evelyn was rewriting him.
Austin reached for Caroline’s phone.
“Who are you calling?”
She moved it away.
“My attorney.”
He laughed.
“Of course.”
Then he reached again.
Caroline’s cast caught him across the shoulder as he leaned over the bed.
Austin lost his balance.
His knees hit the polished floor.
Caroline pressed the heavy cast down across his upper back before he could surge up again.
Not enough to injure him.
Enough to stop him from grabbing her.
Austin stared at the floor, stunned.
“You broke your leg, not your hands,” he snarled. “Get home and cook for my mother.”
Caroline almost smiled.
She held the phone closer.
Austin twisted and reached across the mattress.
“If you divorce me, you leave with nothing.”
His fingers nearly caught the phone.
Caroline knocked his hand away and pressed him back down with the cast.
“You’re threatening the woman who can erase your title.”
Austin stopped struggling.
Evelyn stopped breathing.
Then Jonathan Blake’s voice came through the speaker.
“Madam Chairwoman, the audit has started.”
Austin slowly lifted his head.
“What?”
Caroline watched confusion replace arrogance.
Evelyn’s face changed differently.
Fear.
Austin saw it.
So did Caroline.
He lunged for the phone.
Caroline pulled it back.
“What audit?”
Jonathan did not answer.
Caroline had already ended the call.
For twenty minutes Austin had been threatening to take the house, the SUV, the accounts, and everything else he believed Caroline depended on him to keep.
He had never once asked why his mother looked terrified when Jonathan called her Madam Chairwoman.
That was Austin’s first mistake.
His second was assuming the audit had begun because Caroline broke her leg.
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It had actually begun because Robert Parker died.
And somewhere between those two events was a corporate instruction Austin had never been allowed to see.
